Tag Archives: politics
ALA joins Apple, Microsoft in demanding surveillance transparency | District Dispatch | ALA Washington
Today, the American Library Association (ALA) joined an unprecedented coalition of Internet companies and advocates to deliver a letter to the U.S. government demanding greater transparency around national security-related surveillance of Internet and telephone communications.
The Best Search Engine You’re Probably Not Using | Gizmodo
Do you like privacy? Do you shun surveillance and eschew spam? Do you like simplicity? If you answered yes to any of those questions, you’ll love DuckDuckGo.
via The Best Search Engine You’re Probably Not Using | Gizmodo
Burma’s Lucky Bibliophile | The Irrawaddy Magazine
When the Ministry of Information’s director general visited Ye Htet Oo’s library in 2010, it could have been disastrous. Ye Htet Oo, then a recent college graduate, was running his new library in downtown Rangoon on the sly, without approval from the former military regime, and was told he could face three months in jail for every book he lent without permission from the censorship board. Unable to get a library license from the government, which saw libraries as a way to spread subversive ideas, he fronted his operation as a bookshop but kept a collection of unapproved library books hidden in a back room. Then one day, unknown to the young bibliophile, the ministry’s director general—who has since become the deputy minister of information and President Thein Sein’s spokesman—entered the “bookshop” and walked straight into the secret room.
For the full article and Q&A with Ye Htet Oo see: Burma’s Lucky Bibliophile | The Irrawaddy Magazine.
The Enormous Opportunity In Educating And Empowering Girls | Co.Exist
Giving young girls an education has such a huge impact in developing countries that you need to see it to believe it. A new film called Girl Rising shows how education affects nine girls from nine countries–with some help from Meryl Streep.
CNN will be broadcasting Girl Rising June 16 & June 22. Check out the Girl Rising trailer website.
10×10 (Educate Girls: Change the World) is “a global action campaign for educating girls.” There will be a companion curriculum launched on October 11, 2013, The International Day of the Girl. The curriculum will be free of charge and educators can fill out a form to be notified when the curriculum is available.
There is also the 10×10 Book Club with toolkits for book clubs for two specific books so far (they will be adding more), as well as young adult and middle grade toolkits.
The Declassification Engine: Your One-Stop Shop for Government Secrets | Wired Enterprise | Wired.com
A fascinating article about researchers developing the “Declassification Engine” – a tool to analyze declassified documents in the United States.
In many cases, documents are declassified only because individuals will request them under the Freedom of Information Act, and this often means they’re spread to the four winds. “There are a lot of declassified documents out there. Some of them are in historians’ basements. Some are in specific libraries. Some are in digital archives. And they’re in different formats. No one has systematically collected them into a searchable, usable, user-friendly database,” says Columbia law professor David Pozen.
The Declassification Engine seeks to remedy this, but that’s only the first step. Columbia’s Matthew Connelly first dreamed up the idea when he realized that although more and more government documents are now created in electronic format, a dwindling percentage are declassified in electronic format. The rise of digital records, he told himself, should provide more opportunities for researchers, not less.
See the full article: The Declassification Engine: Your One-Stop Shop for Government Secrets | Wired Enterprise | Wired.com.
Jaron Lanier: The Internet destroyed the middle class – Salon.com
The article is an interview with the author who challenges our obsession with digital culture.
“Kodak employed 140,000 people. Instagram, 13. A digital visionary says the Web kills jobs, wealth — even democracy.”
“His book continues his war on digital utopianism and his assertion of humanist and individualistic values in a hive-mind world. But Lanier still sees potential in digital technology: He just wants it reoriented away from its main role so far, which involves “spying” on citizens, creating a winner-take-all society, eroding professions and, in exchange, throwing bonbons to the crowd.”
via Jaron Lanier: The Internet destroyed the middle class – Salon.com.
Closure of fisheries’ libraries called ‘a ‘disaster’ for science | Canada.com
Closure of fisheries’ libraries called ‘a ‘disaster’ for science | Canada.com
Quotables
“Seven DFO libraries across Canada are to close by the fall, including two that have been amassing books and technical reports on the aquatic realm for more than a century.”
“It is information destruction unworthy of a democracy,” said Peter Wells, an ocean pollution expert at Dalhousie University in Halifax, who describes the closing of the libraries as a “national tragedy.”
“It will likely be a decade or more before all DFO’s technical reports are all digitized and available online, the librarian said. But most of the reference books and materials in the DFO libraries – like Russia’s fishing monograms – cannot be digitized by the department because of copyright restrictions.”
“Wells see the library closures as more evidence of the way the federal government is “eviscerating” aquatic science by cutting jobs and eliminating programs, labs and services. “Libraries cannot simply be replaced by digitized collections,” he said.”
City of New York settles with Occupy over destruction of the People’s Library » MobyLives
“The City of New York and Brookfield Properties has agreed to pay more than $233,000 to settle a lawsuit brought by Occupy Wall Street over the destruction of the People’s Library during the eviction of Zuccotti Park by the New York Police Department last fall. During the raid to clear the park in the early morning hours of November 15th 2011, the majority of the collection of more than 4,000 books donated by the public and organized by the Library Working Group was destroyed or damaged, an act roundly condemned by the American Library Association, as did the New York Civil Liberties Union and the National Lawyers Guild.” via City of New York settles with Occupy over destruction of the People’s Library » MobyLives.
DMCA chilling effects: How copyright law hurts security research. – Slate Magazine
An informative exposition on the DMCA and security research. I thought the article interesting and a reminder of the power of political and lobbying bodies in the US. In Canada, we are weathering our own struggle against the muzzling of our scientific researchers and librarians by the PMO.
“The outdated copyright law doesn’t just hurt consumers—it cripples researchers.” via DMCA chilling effects: How copyright law hurts security research. – Slate Magazine.
You may also like:
- Federal watchdog to study policies that ‘muzzle’ scientists | The Canadian Press | Macleans.ca on campus
- Future Librarians for Intellectual Freedom | Are librarians the new threat? | The Modern MLIS
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